Life Is Short, Proust Is Long

Of all the forms of entertainment, reading is the most laborious. Doing the voices of fictional characters in your head is hard. Remembering their names is also hard. Prolonged sitting, we are told, is as bad for us as smoking. Reading is abysmally sedentary. All motion is confined to the eyes, and there the mechanics are ungainly. The human retina is a sensor that is weakest at its edges. Only at its very center, in a region called the fovea, do we see with sufficient acuity to tell individual letters apart. The fovea is small, just wide enough to encompass eight characters. When we read, we are peering through this pinhole. The analogy is with a blinkered horse.

For five millennia, humans have read linearly. It is surprising that this convention has lasted. Rather than correcting for our weaknesses, linear reading exacerbates them. The problem lies in the saccade, the quivering motion of the fovea from one fixation point to the next. These transitions, which are unconscious, aren’t smooth. Frequently, saccades miss their target, and our eyes slip from the line or regress along it. Recovering costs us time.

Spritz, a Boston-based startup, intends to fix this. On its Web site, the company’s founders assert that “only around 20% of your time is spent processing content” when reading. “The remaining 80% is spent physically moving your eyes from word to word.” They have accordingly developed technology to obviate the need for this movement. Text appears in what they call the “redicle”: a rectangular window designed to float in the upper portion of an electronic screen, inside which up to thirteen letters at a time strobe into visibility. The background is white, the font is black, and the single-character optimal recognition point (O.R.P.)—a neologism denoting the ideal letter for the reading eye to fixate on—is set off in an attractive red. (Or another color of the user’s choice.) The result is a reading experience that is tailored to the dimensions of the fovea. Text streams in, word by word. As the company asserts, the redicle “not only reduces the number of times your eyes move” but “also decreases the number of times your eyes pass over words for your brain to understand them.” Adults read linearly at around three hundred words a minute; Spritz promises rates of up to a thousand, and also greater comprehension. When Spritz unveiled its Web site, late in February, it envisioned a new era: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ in a day? You betcha.”

The demo on Spritzinc.com proves that it works, in limited doses. How it would hold up over the longer haul of a novel, or a single sentence by Henry James, remains a subject of speculation. When I asked Keith Rayner, a professor of psychology at U.C. San Diego who runs an eye-tracking laboratory, for his opinion of the science behind Spritz, he was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Hogwash.” Spritz’s Web site alludes to eye-tracking studies but doesn’t cite any in particular, an omission Spritz defends as a way of protecting its intellectual property. Rayner thinks that it is telling. “The language, the techniques—they used different words,” he said. “But the ideas have been around since the seventies.”

Rayner was referring to rapid serial visual presentation (R.S.V.P.), a decades-old speed-reading method that functions, like Spritz, by flashing individual words onto a screen. The difference lies in the O.R.P., which R.S.V.P. lacks. In his 2009 book, “Reading in the Brain,” the French cognitive scientist Stanislas Dehaene suggests that R.S.V.P. might point the way for “the future of reading in a world where screens progressively replace paper.” Spritz presents itself as that future, but Rayner argues that, like R.S.V.P., “It won’t work on longer texts. Every time the brain needs to pause, it will be derailed.”

The dream of speed-reading has been around since long before screens were ubiquitous. Evelyn Wood, a Salt Lake City schoolteacher, formalized the practice in the late nineteen-fifties. Her methods made her a public figure (Cheech and Chong parodied her infomercials), and they remain paradigmatic. As the Web site that sells her books of exercises puts it: “Read down the page, not from left to right; read groups of words or complete thoughts, rather than one word at a time; avoid involuntary re-reading of material.” Wood herself claimed to read twenty-seven hundred words a minute; devotees of her teachings have reported speeds as high as fourteen thousand words a minute. Once, in an interview, she said, “Which would you rather do: Eat a dish of rice kernel by kernel or take a spoonful to get a good taste?” For the applied version of this philosophy, Wood coined the term “chunking.”

“Speed-reading” has always been something of a misnomer. Michael Masson, a psychologist at the University of Victoria, has done studies comparing graduates of a speed-reading course with “naïve” control groups. He asked both to read at a rate of between five hundred and six hundred words a minute. Speed-readers fared “somewhat better” with general questions about simple texts (“Reader’s Digest-like stuff,” as Masson described it), but when it came to detailed questions, or difficult texts, there was no difference. Masson also recorded their eye movements. “Speed-readers sample texts differently than regular skimmers,” he told me. “Their saccades occur at large regular intervals.” Masson concluded that speed-readers—even successful speed-readers—weren’t actually apprehending text faster. Instead, they were artfully scanning what they read for fragments from which they could reconstruct a plausible whole.

Masson thought Spritz might change the way we read “on smaller screens” (Spritz has emphasized that these are its ideal setting), but wondered whether readers would struggle with Spritz’s unflagging tempo. Each of us has a grasp of language that is idiosyncratic. It varies according to constant factors, like personal history, and ephemeral ones, like fatigue. It would be hard to write code to accommodate each reader’s oddities. Masson also contests the startup’s core claim. “The eighty-twenty ratio that they mention on their Web site is misleading,” he said. “What I know indicates the reverse.” (Spritz maintains that its information is accurate.) When we read, Masson explained, the distinction between the errors that we make with our eyes and the understanding that we reach with our brains is not clear-cut. “One of the reasons regressive eye movements occur is to repair comprehension failures,” Masson said.

There are different ways of conceptualizing this muddled process. A representative from Spritz drew my attention to a study confirming that its ratio reflects the time “needed to acquire most of the information.” The question is: What is “most”? No one gets all of “Ulysses.” How much not-getting is tolerable is a judgment each of us makes. Some people think that the painful slowness of turning pages is inseparable from the value of their text. David Mikics, in his 2013 book, “Slow Reading in a Hurried Age,” writes, “Reading better means reading more slowly.” Mikics, an American academic, compares his work with that of advocates of Slow Food. He is the latest in a long line of literary pundits in a quarrel with the velocity of modern life, a tradition that extends through the “deep reading” of Sven Birkerts (who coined the term in the nineteen-nineties) back to the “close reading” of William Empson, the English poet and critic. Empson worshipped language and objected to the simplification of it. He denounced spelling. In “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” from 1930, he wrote, “Only our snobbish oddity of spelling imposes on us the notion that one mechanical word, to be snapped up by the eye, must have been intended.” Empson believed that confusion was part of the reading experience.

Empson also thought that John Milton wasn’t much of a Christian, that John Donne believed in extraterrestrials, and that Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed in fairies. In at least one way, slow reading is always unreasonable. It denies finitude. “Life is too short,” as Anatole France once put it, “and Proust is too long.” The problem with taking your time is that time runs out. The case of Gustave Flaubert is illustrative. The author once wrote, “What a scholar one would be if one knew well only five or six books.” But Flaubert was himself an obsessive reader. In researching “Bouvard et Pécuchet,” his final novel, to which he considered adding the subtitle “An Encyclopedia of Human Stupidity,” Flaubert read fifteen hundred books. The five years he spent on it were, however, too brief, and he died before completing the manuscript. A smarter writer would have been a less serious reader. Flaubert should have chunked.

It is possible to love literature but not its delivery system. George Orwell thought books gave off “more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented.” Vladimir Nabokov held language to be a “miracle,” but he didn’t think much of reading. He told his students at Cornell, “The very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book …this stands between us and artistic appreciation.” Spritz takes the work, along with the dust, out of the picture. At a thousand words a minute, it should enable you to appreciate “Lolita” in just under two hours. (“À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” is doable, theoretically, in twenty-five.) The app’s technicians have streamlined reading by eliminating waste and tightening slack, in a spirit of corporate thrift, “so you can spend more time doing what you want to do.” But what if reading is what you want to do?

Nabokov didn’t conclude that we should give up reading. He said, rather, that we should do more of it: “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” The complicated work was part of the complicated pleasure, the waste of time integral to the feeling that it was well spent. The inefficiency was also high design. It must be hard to derive a business model from these contradictions—ask someone in publishing—and, lately, Spritz has been revising. Can “Atlas Shrugged” really be read in a day? “Technically it’s possible,” the text now reads. “You might want to take some breaks though. You might even want to stop to smell the roses.” When contacted, Spritz stressed that there is a pause button.